The Life and Times of Jeff Squyres

Who needs a stinkin' entry title, anyway?

Per a prior entry, I got my Blackjack Bold. In general, I’m much happier with it than I ever was with my Crapjack. It has one or two annoying “features”, but in general, it’s great.

My wife has a Blackberry Curve, so I’ve been able to compare the two models pretty closely. For my needs, I’m much happier with the Bold. It’s a little bigger and thinner — meaning that it has a bigger and brighter screen (IMHO). The keys feel a bit more natural to me, too. And the GUI on the Bold is definitely more “modern”.

Of course, within two weeks of receipt, I put my Blackberry through the laundry. DOH! And I did it the day before I left for a week-long trip. Yoinks. It was quite painful to be traveling and not have a phone. So I had to buy another one. Yuck. :-( But I finally got my replacement, and I’m being much more careful with it…

PROS:

It’s much more reliable; I haven’t seen it randomly reboot, for example.

UPDATE: I’ve now seen plenty of random reboots…

The interface is much more modern (which is really a subjective point, but I still like it much better than the Crapjack interface) and is much more internally consistent than the Crapjack interface

Easy things are easy on the Blackberry. I don’t feel like looking up my old entry, but it was many, many clicks just to send a text message on my Crapjack. From the start screen, it’s 2 clicks and trackball 2 rolls (excluding typing characters to type the name of the person I want to SMS) to send a text message (or call or MMS or email). Much better.

There are keyboard shorcuts in the email index screen. For example, you can jump to the top of the index, bottom of the index, to the previous/next day, etc. You don’t have to scroll scroll scrooollll to get to where you want to go.

There’s a Google Mobile app that works on the Blackberry (it didn’t work at all on the Crapjack because of weird Java issues). I love getting both my work and home email on one device.

CONS

There’s no way to lock the keypad. It’ll “lock” the device, but then any keypress will start entering the device password.

UPDATE: Holding down the “mute” button on the top will lock the device. Handy.

It appears that the Blackberry Enterprise service installs some software on the back-end Exchange server that monitors your INBOX. Any time a message arrives or changes state (e.g., you reply to a message), it deletes the message, processes it, and then puts it back in your INBOX. Some of the processing includes making every message be a multipart-mine message — it adds an HTML-ified version of every plain-text message, for example. This is highly annoying to me for two reasons:

I receive my work email via IMAP on the OS X Mail application. Apparently, Mail is fast enough to see the message before the Blackberry service deletes it. So a mail will arrive, appear in my INBOX, then disappear, and then re-appear. Very annoying, because it changes focus, “blinks” the index pane, etc.

I send and receive mostly plain text email (because I am a programmer and communicate mostly with other programmers). Since the Blackberry service adds an HTML version of the mail to each message, the Apple Mail application assumes that you want to see the HTML version (there’s no way to tell it “I prefer the plain text mail”). So I’ve effectively lost the ability to see plain text mails. Arrgh!

Hopefully, the above Exchange integration item can be fixed in the not-distant future (unfortunately, I’m not holding my breath — there have been reports of Blackberry doing this for several years). Other than that, though, I’m pretty happy with my new device.